The CEO of DeNA Co., whose health care information website and others have been under fire following accusations of plagiarism and inaccurate reporting, apologized Wednesday over the scandal, vowing to investigate what went wrong. "We'd like to sincerely apologize to all concerned parties and individuals for causing troubles and worries," Isao Moriyasu, who is also the president of the company, said at a news conference in Tokyo. "Regardless of forms of media, providing accurate information needs to be the first priority when operating a media business," he said. "Our operation focused too much on growing the services." The Tokyo-based firm, which is best known for its mobile video games and professional baseball team, the Yokohama DeNA Baystars, said it will bring in an independent third-party panel to investigate the causes of the poorly handled media services, or so-called curated news sites.

For decades Hollywood has treated computers as magic boxes from which endless plot points could be conjured, in denial of all common sense. TV and movies depicted data centers accessible only through undersea intake valves, cryptography that can be cracked through a universal key, and e-mails whose text arrives one letter at a time, all in caps. "Hollywood hacker bullshit," as a character named Romero says in an early episode of Mr. Robot, now in its second season on the USA Network. "I've been in this game 27 years. Not once have I come across an animated singing virus."

Imagine a world where you can experience your wildest dreams, interact with artificially intelligent characters and do whatever you want without consequences. While this may be the plot of the hit HBO series "Westworld," based on Michael Crichton's book of the same name, the future of artificial intelligence (AI) we see on our screens may come sooner than we think. According to VentureBeat, Crichton's story follows wealthy guests who holiday in the "almost-real theme park of Westworld, which is full of androids who are instructed not to harm the human guests." The guests, however, can do anything they want, without consequences. When Crichton's "Westworld" was released in 1973, the ideas in it were considered science fiction, but while the use of technology in the show is at a level that's unfeasible today, it's no longer unimaginable.

As a follow-up to my previous post "Using Machine Learning to predict Customer Behaviour", I wanted to address a similar topic but from an e-commerce perspective. How to you predict the behaviour of your visitors in your online store? Let's look at how Machine Learning can help you address each of the challenges posed by those four branches. In order to keep this post short, I've decided to split it in 4 parts where I'll cover each of the 4 segments. Let's start with product analytics.

Creating aesthetically pleasing pieces of art, including music, has been a long-term goal for artificial intelligence research. Despite recent successes of long-short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in sequential learning, LSTM neural networks have not, by themselves, been able to generate natural-sounding music conforming to music theory. To transcend this inadequacy, we put forward a novel method for music composition that combines the LSTM with Grammars motivated by music theory. The main tenets of music theory are encoded as grammar argumented (GA) filters on the training data, such that the machine can be trained to generate music inheriting the naturalness of human-composed pieces from the original dataset while adhering to the rules of music theory. Unlike previous approaches, pitches and durations are encoded as one semantic entity, which we refer to as note-level encoding. This allows easy implementation of music theory grammars, as well as closer emulation of the thinking pattern of a musician. Although the GA rules are applied to the training data and never directly to the LSTM music generation, our machine still composes music that possess high incidences of diatonic scale notes, small pitch intervals and chords, in deference to music theory.

Researchers from University of Toronto developed an AI system that creates and then sings a Christmas song based by analyzing the visual components of an uploaded image. With the help of CUDA, Tesla K40 GPUs and cuDNN to train their deep learning models, the researchers trained their neural network on 100 hours of online music. Once trained, the program can take a musical scale and melodic profile and produce a simple 120-beats-per-minute melody -- it then adds chords and drums. The next step was to train their'Neural karaoke' program on a collection of pictures and their captions to learn how specific works can be linked to visual patterns and objects – once fed an image, the program can compile relevant lyrics and sing them. "We are used to thinking about AI for robotics and things like that. The question now is what can AI do for us?" said Raquel Urtasun, an associate professor in machine learning and computer vision at Toronto's computer science lab.

The US Supreme Court told a lower court to take another look at a $399 million award won by Apple from rival Samsung for copying the design of the iPhone. The unanimous decision extends a legal battle that dates back to 2011 and at one point spanned the globe and engulfed every major maker of smartphones. Writing for the court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Apple might not be entitled to Samsung's entire profit on 11 infringing smartphones. She told a federal appeals court to consider whether Apple should be able to recoup profits attributable only to particular components. The high court stopped short of deciding that question itself.

Remember the sci-fi movie Johnny Mnemonic, made more than two decades ago? Specifically that quirky scene depicting Keanu Reeves wrapped in a VR suite, using hand gestures to navigate the "future internet"? A decade after that, Minority Report envisioned a scenario where augmented "stuff" would enrich the reality we actually live in. I cannot remember a movie that puts more focus on the "augmented user experience". In countless scenes, we are compelled to imagine a future where this additional layer of reality becomes a natural part of the mundane.

Heading into last night's season finale of "Westworld," the show's android hosts were poised to finally, as our President-elect might put it, throw off their shackles: Maeve was plotting an escape into the human world, and Dolores was moving closer to the core of her own memories and identity. Among the guests, the cold-blooded Man in Black approached the center of the mysterious maze, an achievement that he hoped might herald an upending of the park's unnatural order. In fleeing their engineered lives and games, though, none of the show's androids--nor, indeed, any of the humans--ended up making it out of the park's walls. Instead, the robots staged their liberation from within, and--thanks to an eleventh-hour flourish by Ford--arose to dominate Westworld, not to defy it. Throughout the show's first season, Maeve, with her penetrating and cool violence, often seemed closer to liberation than Dolores, who was always this close to breaking down.

Microsoft is taking another shot at giving users a friendly AI-driven bot conversation partner. On Monday, the company released Zo, a chatbot that users can converse with on Kik, the popular messaging platform. Zo is a follow-up to Tay, the tech giant's first foray into friendly, English-speaking chatbots. It's clear that the company has learned from its first attempt, when the friendly chatbot was turned into a font of white supremacist propaganda by malicious users. In contrast, Zo adamantly refuses to discuss political matters.